


locked in time, out on the wire

by atlantisairlock



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Doomed Relationship, Doomed Timelines, Falling In Love, M/M, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26248744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: Neil is Kat's son; everything else loops from there.
Relationships: Kat & Neil (Tenet), Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 264





	locked in time, out on the wire

**Author's Note:**

> inb4:
> 
> \- based on the sick fan theory i saw on reddit that posited max = neil, obviously  
> \- yes, i know jdw is like... 36 irl in canon itself, let's just pretend inverting fucks with your aging process so i can have protagoneil without the age gap getting weird as fuck  
> \- gave the protagonist a name because it was otherwise impossible to write this. if you've read the story of daedalus and icarus you'll know why i picked the name 
> 
> title from 'fires' by ronan keating.

When he’s young (although those distinctions seem to matter much less, now), he goes by Max. _Maximilien_ is a bit of a mouthful, especially on the playground - his mother agrees, but he learns, when he’s a little older, that his father insisted. “Like Maximilien Robespierre,” she tells Max during one of his history lessons. “A brilliant man. One that changed the world, but lost himself in his aspirations to greatness. Believing himself a God, when he was merely a mortal, breathing and bleeding and dying like any of us.”

Even then, at the tender age of six, he understands she’s not just talking about Robespierre. But she never talks about his father in anything but shadowy metaphors, bits and pieces of information she throws out when he least expects them, that he needs to read between the lines to understand. Max’s childhood is haunted by his ghost. His mother stands tall, smiles warmly at him whenever he brings home another perfect score on a test, but up until the day she dies, he never feels like he truly knows her for what she is. She’s not fond of straight answers - she makes him ask questions, makes him seek out their answers on his own. He’s not privy to the story behind the scar on her abdomen; neither is he ever allowed to handle the sleek black cellphone that is always on her person. She loves him, she is always by his side, but she keeps her secrets.

The closest Max thinks he ever comes to understanding her is when she sits by his bed and tells him stories to lull him to sleep. He doesn’t get fairy tales or Enid Blyton - he gets tales seemingly weaved by her own hand, about smart, sly heroes who bend the rules, who achieve the impossible in the face of insurmountable odds. When he gets a little older, they sit on the couch some nights and watch shows that make him think - everything from Doctor Who to Primer, from Source Code to The Lake House. She tells him about bootstrap paradoxes and entropy and makes him realise, early on, that the world is never so simple as it appears to be. Just like her.

“Backwards and forwards, cause and effect,” she says. “The same thing, just expressed differently, experienced differently. It’s the difference between walking upstream and downstream in the same river. The you of tomorrow morning is the you of the future, but the you of right now is the you of the past for him. But wherever you might be, whenever you might be - you are still Max, and you always will be. Do you understand?”

At ten, he doesn’t, but he knows he wants to. He reads, voraciously, picking up academic texts twice his grade level to try and parse what she means. His teachers in school recommend placing him in advanced programmes, then when even those become child’s play, they eventually speak to his mother about transferring him somewhere that can truly challenge him.

He’s in college by sixteen, studying theoretical physics, racing to the top of the class. He never slips for a moment, not even when his mother gets sick his second year, when she starts wasting away in his third. Max sits by her bedside in the hospital after his classes, holding her hand and reading passages from his academic texts aloud for her to hear.

“I’m here,” she tells him, one of the last things she says before she dies - one hand pressed to his chest, over his heart. “With you, always - and in the past. Remember, Max. Backwards and forwards, the same thing. When you walk upstream, I will be with you. Backwards and forwards.”

“The same thing,” he repeats, squeezing her hand tight, holding on to this moment just one second longer.

Kat dies when when he’s eighteen; ‘Max’ dies with her. Or does he? Backwards and forwards, he remembers. Two days after he buries her, he registers to change his name, because Max is his mother’s son, his father’s, and he’s not sure he can be that any more. They ask him what he’s changing his name to; he thinks for a few moments, pondering on his own name. _Maximilien,_ he hears the echoes of his mother’s voice, called back from years ago. _Like Robespierre. A brilliant man -_

 _Neil,_ he decides. Still him, but not. Stepping into a different point in the river, walking upstream. As Neil he graduates with a First from Edinburgh; as Neil he sells the house he’s lived in since birth and moves into the heart of London, looking into a good Masters programme to further his studies.

His first month at Sussex, taking his Quantum Tech programme, he looks up from his laptop in the quiet library to find a handsome man sitting opposite him. Neil’s pretty certain he wasn’t there a few seconds ago. He looks about thirty, thirty-five, maybe ten or fifteen years older than Neil is. He observes Neil like he imagines a scientist would a particularly unique specimen. “Neil Redder,” he says, dragging the name out slow. “Graduate from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. Bachelor’s degree in Theoretical Physics. You consistently topped your class, so no surprise that you graduated with a First and went on to come here to do your Masters. All that before you turned twenty. Quite the beginnings of a resume.”

Neil sits and smiles back calmly, despite the creepiness inherent in a complete stranger apparently knowing the details about his tertiary education. “You know a lot about me,” he says, extending a hand. “A shame that the reverse isn’t true.”

The man laughs. His handshake is strong and firm, palm warm against Neil’s own. “I think you know more than you believe.” His dark eyes keep studying him across the table. “Barely twenty-one and you’re already primed to become one of the experts in the field of temporal physics. Have you ever thought about what you’re going to do about it?”

The question’s a fair one - Neil’s spent almost his entire life hungry for knowledge, making its pursuit his only goal; he’s already got plans to do a PhD once he finishes his Masters programme. He’s not about to reveal as much to this man, though, so he just shrugs. The man just looks like he expected that very non-answer. He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a square card that gleams in the light, slides it over to Neil. Twenty-five letters, starkly familiar from his history and mythology lessons with his mother. “A Rotas square,” he observes. “What about it?”

“It’s an offer,” the man says. He leans forward, arms resting on the table, meeting Neil’s gaze and refusing to break it. “You can sit here reading theory after theory in academic journal after academic journal, Neil. You can get that fancy certificate, take it, and run off to chase yet another title at another prestigious university. You can do that for the rest of your life, learning the intricacies of the world around you and committing them to memory. Or you can get out there and do something about it.”

Neil runs his thumb over the surface of the card, thinking it over. “I don’t even know your name.”

Another laugh; this one is almost contagious, making Neil crack a smile in return. “Call me Daedalus. Welcome to Tenet.”

His first few months in Tenet, he spends most of his time with Daedalus - learning how to fight, how to work with his team, how to invert. Daedalus watches his skills improve, first with a critical eye, then with an appreciative one. Neil knows he’s faster than all the other new trainees, both in raw physical speed and the pace with which he’s been picking up new knowledge. Some of it feels almost like muscle memory. Like he’s been here before.

He guesses it’s the inversion. He remembers what his mother told him as a child, remembers everything he’s learned from books and journals and lectures, but playing with time is still a complicated, dangerous thing. Not all the recruits make it through training. Dropout rates are always highest after the first inversion. It’s not so much the inability to function and fight in an inverted world (or as Daedalus is always saying, to fight inverted in a normal world), but also the sheer wrongness that overwhelms some of the recruits when they step out of the chamber. All the theory and practice Tenet can prepare them with doesn’t always translate to the ability to let go of the hard-coded understanding of linear time.

It doesn’t faze Neil. Yes, he experiences time linearly, for the most part, but he’s been looking at the concept of it differently since he could string sentences together. When he inverts for the first time and exits the chamber, the world still makes sense to him. Past, present and future, all at once. They’re the same. He has grown up learning that truth. This is where he’s meant to be.

Within the year he’s a full recruit, the best of his group once more. Daedalus claps him on the shoulder when he’s officially inducted, looking proud, looking pleased, but there’s something in his eyes that seems off, that just doesn’t seem to make sense. A distance in his gaze that reminds him, abruptly, of his mother - the way she sometimes seemed to be looking beyond the world they inhabited into a dimension beyond his reach. It’s the first time he sees that look; it won’t be the last.

Later - after the passage of time brings with it different assignments, dangerous missions - Neil learns that the best way to rid Daedalus of that look is to kiss him, to steal the breath from his lungs and ground him so deeply in the moment that past and future become negligible. The first time it happens, it’s after a two-day inversion where they stop some megalomaniac from acquiring some very lethal vials of poison. When they stumble out of the turnstile and remove their gas tanks, Daedalus turns to him and laughs, bright and relieved, and Neil feels something in him surge, something that pushes him to close the gap between them. Daedalus kisses him back with a ferocity that appears to surprise them both. It makes Neil laugh a little giddily when he pulls back. “Have you wanted this a while?”

Daedalus answers him with another kiss - this one softer, but no less intense, charged with emotion. “More than you know,” he replies. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You could have taken some initiative,” Neil retorts, just to hear Daedalus laugh again, have him pull them back towards his room in headquarters.

There isn’t much time or inclination on his part to think about that afterwards, not when he’s lying sleepy and sated in Daedalus’ bed, drifting off to the sound of his heartbeat through his chest. He remembers the kiss, of course; to his dying breath he never forgets the way it felt to press his mouth to Daedalus’, hot and sweet against his own. But the words get lost in the vestiges of a memory, one frequently inverted and rewritten, only making sense far into the future (or far into the past).

_I’ve been waiting for you._

For years, he works in Tenet, frequently diving into the stream of time and swimming the wrong way to fix a chaotic world. Neil goes back hours, days, sometimes weeks; he learns to breathe as easy inverted as he does in normal time. He ages slowly, erratically; so does Daedalus, and indeed the entire team. Only to be expected for people who regularly move outside the confines of linearity. Neil wouldn’t say time passes slower for them per se, but there’s something thrilling and wonderful to know they have a control over it that nobody else has. He spends every day as a Tenet agent grateful that Daedalus found him in Sussex and gave him this - especially on quiet, peaceful nights when they lie in bed together, content and happy. They have more time - all the time in the world, technically - to be together.

Neil turns twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, older, always with Daedalus at his side, and as the years melt by, intertwined and unwritten and recreated, he thinks he understands better than ever before what his mother meant when he said she’d always be with him, _backwards and forwards._ He loves Daedalus; loves and loved and will love him, in every moment, in every incarnation of his self, past, present and future. An inevitability, more so than the way one second ticks upon the next.

In Tenet they learn to work with time, and against it; they learn to bend it around themselves, learn to step in and out of it, learn to manipulate it to their will. The one thing they never achieve is stopping it. It’s on a quiet, rainy evening when Neil is forty-two the first time he wishes desperately that they knew how to.

“Don’t leave me,” he begs, holding Daedalus’ hand so tight it hurts. Neil wants to drag him into a turnstile, come out the other side, go back and back until he can steal them another year, or five, or ten. Daedalus simply looks at him with a peaceful smile, like he’s ready to go, like he’s done. And Neil wants to be done too - doesn’t want to visualise a future, any concept of a future, without him in it. “I can’t do this without you. I can’t - I can’t live without you.”

“You’ll have to,” Daedalus says, on his last breaths, almost gone. Neil could hit him for saying it, but it sounds less like an instruction and more like a prophecy, like a fact. “Neil,” he continues. “There’s something I need to tell you.” His eyes are cloudy with age, with illness, but they look right at Neil regardless. “I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.”

“What?” Neil asks, bewildered, heart aching. Daedalus’ laugh is hoarse and raspy, one shaking hand pressing a key into his palm, curling Neil’s fingers around it. “Open the strongbox in my room, after,” he instructs, carefully eliding what ‘after’ means. “You’ll understand. And know that I’m sorry. Know that I love you, in every place and time, whatever may come to pass.”

Neil doesn’t understand why Daedalus has to say that, why he sounds so stricken when he does. Neil knows it. In a world where even time, age and space are in flux, it is the one thing he knows to be true and infallible - he loves Daedalus and Daedalus loves him, even after the light leaves his eyes and his heart ceases to beat forever.

Then he opens the strongbox, after, as promised. Reads the letter within it - pages upon pages of excruciating detail, in Daedalus’ familiar hand, a legacy left behind for Neil to fulfil.

And he understands.

Of all the Tenet agents he knows, Neil is the one who’s inverted himself the furthest through time. He’s managed to survive an inversion of five months to stop a would-be terrorist from stealing some uranium. He was assigned to that mission by Daedalus, and back then, he’d thought it was simply because he was one of the best. He knows now that it wasn’t just because of that. It wasn’t just trust - it was preparation.

Inverting almost forty years is something nobody has done before, nobody has even conceived of - or at least, not yet. Then - _no,_ Neil thinks, scratch that. What’s happened has happened. He’s done this. He did it. He knows he did, because Daedalus told him so.

_Backwards and forwards._

He stockpiles his air, prepares the chamber, brings the letter. He goes up to the turnstile in headquarters and looks past the glass to the other side, sees himself exiting.

Neil takes a breath, and steps inside.

Almost forty years pass in reverse for him.

Most of his time is spent in a quiet shipping container, lying on his spartan bed and looking up at the ceiling. Utterly alone. He reads and rereads Daedalus’ letter until he knows every line by heart, could rewrite it from memory. The world skitters by around him, everything happening before it actually does.

He exercises constantly, to keep his strength up and for lack of much better to do. His routine gets easier to accomplish the more time passes, and when he gets up and looks himself in the mirror, he realises the colour of his hair is changing, losing the grey that was beginning to touch the edges. His muscles feel stronger, his eyes sharper. Year after year flows past him and he regains his youth with it. It’s laughable, really, considering he’s an old man, sending himself back into a younger body to die in it.

When he’s not working out, he reads what he can get his hands on; when he’s not reading, he thinks. He does a lot of thinking. He reaches the year his mother dies, with roughly fifteen more to go. Neil thinks about Max, about being Max - lying in his childhood bed listening to stories about paradoxes, about streams. Back when the concept of moving against linear time was a fantastical idea to be explored and dissected, not a facet of his reality.

In hindsight - or foresight? It’s always so hard to find the right words when time bends around you - he wonders how he never realised it earlier, how he never made the connection between his mother’s stories and the world he found himself wrapped up in. Daedalus died never knowing Neil was Max, and Neil knows his mother died never knowing Max was Neil either.

There’s an ironic poetry in it he tries to appreciate.

He re-enters the turnstile exactly a year before the opera house, before Stalk-12. The world returns to normal for him, decades later.

He waits. The days slip past, routine and indistinguishable. He keeps his head down and profile low and counts down until the day arrives -

_I need an assist._

\- and he comes back to life once more.

He doesn’t expect the overwhelming wave of emotion sweeping over him when he finally sets eyes on Daedalus again - younger, stronger, not a trace of sickness about him. When Neil shakes his hand and introduces himself, Daedalus looks at him like he’s a stranger, because he is.

He feels a sudden rush of sympathy for all the recruits he saw drop out of Tenet after their first inversion, realising they couldn’t handle the fight against the progress of time. He has Daedalus’ letter memorised, was warned about what was to come, but nothing could possibly have prepared him for the way his heart seems to split in two in the face of the blankness in his eyes, his surprise when Neil reveals he knows him better than should be possible.

Daedalus will love him for his entire life, in every universe, in every place.

Just not here, not now, not yet.

Neil slips smoothly into his role as handler, everything basically going exactly as described. Sometimes it feels like he knows what he should do or say even before he does. He’s not surprised any more. He’s been here before.

He has a role to play and he plays it to perfection. He feels his chest constrict when Daedalus goes to meet Kat and he just has to sit and wait - accounting for the inversion, it’s been almost sixty, seventy years since he’s seen his mother. He knows from the letter that their paths won’t meet as Neil and Kat until they’re stealing the piece of the Algorithm in that frantic car chase, but it still hurts.

He sits and waits anyway.

It’s strange, being in the warehouse, after they’re both captured. Restrained and being forced to watch his father shoot his mother right before his eyes. Neil doesn’t remember Andrei as Max, so young then - so young now, if he really thinks about it, safely ensconced in Pompeii while the shitshow happens. All things considered, this is the first time he’s truly seeing his father.

Kat survives this. Neil knows how. It doesn’t make it any easier to watch, especially when the other Tenet agents load her up on a stretcher and try to stem the bleeding, when they tell Daedalus that she’s going to die.

Daedalus turns on him before they invert, eyes blazing, still at the beginning of the loop, still unaware of who he really is. “Tell me the truth,” he demands, and Neil is struck by the bitterness that fills his mouth, almost choking him. The darkest part of him, the part that knows how this story ends, the part that had to watch the man he loves fade away while being told he couldn’t follow, wants to do exactly that.

 _You’re my truth,_ Neil thinks. The only truth he’s ever known.

They invert again, and the world warps around them.

When he pushes Kat through the Freeport turnstile he thinks about her saying _you are still Max, and you always will be._ How it's truer than she knows. How echoes of themselves will exist on the face of this earth forever, even when death itself comes to steal them for its own. 

Daedalus knows, when they send her off to get on the yacht in Vietnam, that it’s the last time he’ll ever see her for real. It’s not strictly supposed to be true for Neil in any sense that he knows yet, but Neil watches her from a distance anyway.

She survives this. She survives and goes back to him and raises him so he can come all the way back here, so he can die to save her life. In one week he will die in a cave in Stalk-12 behind a locked door so he can save the lives of the only two people he’s ever (will ever) love.

She’ll be okay. So will Max.

So will _he._

After all - he’s been here before.

Empty-handed on that sandy open plain in Stalk-12, watching Daedalus carry the pieces of the Algorithm that are doomed to be stolen by Andrei again one day in the future/in the past, Neil says his last goodbye. Daedalus’ eyes are misty and his voice shakes, and Neil realises with a bittersweet ache that this is the moment he meant all those years ago, in the years to come. _I’ve been waiting for you._

A river has no end. The water rushes on, endlessly, while infinite versions of himself, of Daedalus and Priya and Andrei and Kat and Ives and everyone involved in the loop repeat their actions to eternity. Past, present and future. Even now, he is in a thousand different places, a thousand different times. He is just born and already dead. Max and Neil, all at once.

He spent a lot of time in that shipping container while inverting, during those long stretches of nothingness, wondering what the point was. Wondering if he could change anything if he just broke one loop and ended things, let the world implode into a paradox. Here and now, looking at Daedalus falling in love with him just as his story is beginning and Neil’s is ending - he finally understands.

Neil knows how this story ends, how it begins again. He walks away, following Ives to get to the turnstile and invert one last time, to save the man he loves so he can survive to recruit him and bring him back and love him and love him and love him to the end of both their lives, until the stars burn out. The one truth he can hold on to, no matter where or when he’ll ever be.

Backwards and forwards.

The same thing.


End file.
